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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5809092" data-attributes="member: 42582">"Consequences", here, means something like "ingame causal consequences assessed counterfactually". Ie, the counterfactual "had the PCs not ganked the guards, there would have been 2 more guards in the throne room" is not true.That is a fairly narrow class of consequences, in my view, when playing an RPG - although an important class of consequences for a certain style of play (in my mind I associate the style with Lewis Pulsipher and Gary Gygax, because they authored the texts in which I see this playstyle most clearly articulated).Removing that sort of consequence from the game can sometimes be a necessary condition of permitting other forms of consequence to emerge. For example, if one of the consequences that is interesting for the game is to see whether the players will resort to taking the king hostage in order to escape from his throne room, it may not be possible for that consequence to emerge if, following the ganking of the guards, the throne room encounter is one that puts no pressure on the players (via their PCs).You are correct that I'm adding complication to prevent the encounter being boring (which would be the relevant category of "screwing up"). If the players wanted to play a game with an "easy ride" - ie one that did not force difficult choices - we could all agree to play 30th level PCs against 1st level encounters. But that's not what my players are interested in. In 4e, at least, that would in fact make for an incredibly boring game.My main goal as GM is to provide interesting and engaging situations for my players to take their PCs into, which honour the players' earlier story choices. The mechanical balance of an encounter is rarely an aspect of this.I don't see that it is per se punishing the players to give their PCs interesting and challenging encounters to confront. I see it more as helping them not waste their Sunday afternoon doing something boring. The more general point is that, in an RPG, adversity for the PCs need not be adversity for the player - in fact, often it is a source of pleasure for the player, because it gives the player something interesting to do in the game.I have GMed a game in which the main focus of play drifted from the encounter, to the preparations for the encounter - so that all the real action happened in planning how to undertake a particular raid/mission (what spells would be cast when on whom, etc) and the actual execution of the raid became a fait accompli. That can be an interesting sort of exercise, but I have come to prefer the alternative approach in my current game, of focusing decision-making in the encounter rather than preceding it. And my players who have played in both games - which is a majority of my current play group - are of a similar view.In a game in which planning, and successful execution of planning, is the main thing, then we are no longer talking about a game focused on "the encounter", the situation, as central to play. In that sort of game the ganking of the guards takes on a different meaning - it becomes an element in the overall execution of a plan - and I would handle it differently. And if I were to run such a scene in 4e - and I have, once - then I would handle it as a skill challenge, so the guards would not be an encounter in their own right but just one element contributing to success or failure in the challenge.</blockquote>

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